An ESPN poll yesterday showed that folks sitting in front of a computer were inclined to believe the former personal trainer-turned-accuser over the star pitcher by a 2-1 margin. So if those were the people that Roger Clemens was hoping to win over, he wasted a trip to Washington.
Oily as he may be, Brian McNamee is simply believed by more people, in part because just about everything else he said about other players has been corroborated.
But Clemens did get to make a couple of speeches, courtesy of some sympathetic Congress people, to a national television audience about not taking shortcuts to success and learning from his mother and grandmother the virtue of hard work, and maybe that made it all worth it for him.
Another problem is that the one witness whom a couple of members of Congress, including House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Henry Waxman and Baltimore's Elijah Cummings, gave so much credence to wasn't even there.
Clemens' teammate and friend, Andy Pettitte, who was lionized as a paragon of anguished candor for the affidavit he provided on the issue, didn't have a seat at the witness table.
What was troublesome about that is this: Pettitte, for as well as everyone spoke of him, also has been inconsistent in what he has said about his involvement with performance-enhancing drugs. Immediately after the Mitchell Report was released, Pettitte said his human growth hormone use was limited to a handful of occasions in 2002. Now, we find out about another brief fling with hGH in 2004.
To be fair to Pettitte, his recent admission that he used hGH more recently was accompanied by a further confession that he received the drug from his father, whom he was trying to avoid implicating.
Still, in the absence of unimpeachable physical evidence, this all comes down to credibility and, because of that, previous falsehoods and half-truths can be grounds to impugn what someone has to say about what Clemens did or didn't do. So, it would have made for a more complete hearing to have Pettitte being grilled in the same way as Clemens and McNamee.
Speaking of credibility, McNamee took a shellacking from some members of the congressional panel who called him a drug dealer and a serial liar and derided him as a sneak for hoarding the bloody swabs and syringes that he provided to federal investigators as evidence of Clemens' alleged performance-enhancing drug use.
But Clemens took his hits, as well. Committee members returned again and again to his conversations with Pettitte in the late 1990s when Pettitte said Clemens first admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Clemens, who refused to trash Pettitte, said his pal simply "misremembered."
But the most poignant comment came from Cummings, who concluded by telling Clemens: "It's hard to believe, you, sir. I hate to say that. You're one of my heroes. But it's hard to believe you."
It wasn't quite the little boy on the courthouse steps supposedly pleading for "Shoeless" Joe Jackson to "Say it ain't so, Joe," but still sad enough.
There is speculation that federal investigators will begin tearing apart Clemens' testimony looking for a Barry Bonds-type indictment - perjury. But even someone whose understanding of the justice system is limited to Law & Order knows a conviction would require a fair bit more evidence than anyone saw yesterday. So that means more probing, more interviews with witnesses and continuing celebrity for McNamee.
In due course, Clemens might be vindicated or he might be convicted or the whole thing might simply dissipate as a case whose provability simply doesn't reach the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
But one thing is for sure: Yesterday was simply too unsatisfying and, in this culture at this moment, that's just not how we allow a show like this to end.
bill.ordine@baltsun.com